A great new theme for Micro.blog: Sumo by Matt Langford. There’s a lot in here that is really well thought out. | Continue reading
Playing around with the new dataset from Overture Maps, a project started a couple years go between Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and others. I can download and query the data, but doesn’t seem like it can really be used if you don’t bring a lot of cash with you. | Continue reading
I’ve tinkered with smaller Llama models, on my Mac and Linux servers, so I thought I’d try Llama 3.1. No surprise the 405-billion parameter model is huge, a 200+ GB download. But even the 70b model seems too much for my M3 with 48 GB RAM. Going to stick with cloud models for the … | Continue reading
There are some wild numbers in this report at Bloomberg about Apple’s spending on TV+ content. Reaffirms my belief that Apple has lost their focus. Too much attention on services, sometimes to the detriment of core platforms, developers, and users. | Continue reading
Mark Zuckerberg writes about Llama 3.1 in a Threads post using images of text instead of a blog. He makes a point that he’s mentioned in recent interviews too, about not wanting to be locked in by platform vendors like Apple: One of my formative experiences has been building our … | Continue reading
Following politics sort of obsessively, senate races, the 2020 primaries, I thought I knew a few things about Kamala Harris, but I’m still learning. Just read this essay by her from Elle in 2019, on being a stepmom — “Momala”. | Continue reading
Back down the rabbit hole of HTTP signatures + ActivityPub today. Fixed an issue, and reviewed the new community group draft. Don’t feel great that my code mostly resembles the make friends and verify requests blog post from 6 years ago rather than newer docs. | Continue reading
It’s such a good feeling to have the Biden reelection campaign drama behind us. It was going to be a slog, and I’m sure Joe knew it. No rush to pick a VP for Kamala Harris. Let’s take a deep breath. And Joe can focus on doing the job, and hopefully get a well-deserved break from … | Continue reading
Micro.blog has a couple options for creating redirects, but adding pages to your blog navigation that go somewhere else hasn’t been intuitive before now. I’ve added a new option that makes this much more discoverable. | Continue reading
Rewatched Twister (singular) this week. It holds up! Went to see Twisters (plural) tonight and it’s also good. Sort of a remake and sort of a sequel, but it works. 🍿 | Continue reading
With the release of GPT-4o-mini, I’m updating some of the models used in Micro.blog. It’s really nice to see the price decrease. Hopefully that is translating to more efficient, less energy use on the servers too. | Continue reading
I was trying some new things with Micro.blog themes and rediscovered that I had made a page that is just recent photos in the blog post category Coffee. This kind of thing is why you should have your own blog. 🙂 | Continue reading
I don’t see myself buying a Vision Pro soon or ever, but love that a hot air balloons video is in the next batch of immersive content. Seems like a great fit. But also, maybe Apple is overthinking this… Any and all content would probably help. | Continue reading
Started a Micro.blog experiment that renders a snapshot of your blog post as an image, which could be used for Open Graph previews or thumbnails in the UI. Not sure the best form this should take when it’s live. Suggestions? If you could have a little thumbnail of any web page, h … | Continue reading
Hard to believe it’s only been 4 days since I blogged that the debate is over about the nominee. Schiff’s statement + Pelosi saying he can’t win + Biden getting COVID… At this point, it’s like swimming upstream. Might be time to call it. 🇺🇸 | Continue reading
In Dallas for a few days. Iced latte outside at Ascension, near White Rock Lake. ☕️ | Continue reading
Downtown from old east Dallas. Some yellow in the sky before sunset. | Continue reading
At Micro.blog we’ve used Sticker Mule for a while. A few years ago, I remember reading something about the founder supporting Trump. We actually talked about it internally. Do we care about the political opinions of companies that make a product we pay for? Ultimately, I decided … | Continue reading
Finally some good news. We need more big plans like this: President Biden is finalizing plans to endorse major changes to the Supreme Court in the coming weeks, including proposals for legislation to establish term limits for the justices and an enforceable ethics code, according … | Continue reading
Om Malik blogging about the Taboola deal: Apple’s decision to strike a deal with Taboola is shocking and off-brand — so much so that I have started to question the company’s long-term commitment to good customer experience, including its commitment to privacy. Apple was a great c … | Continue reading
John Gruber blogs that it’s the guns: The truth is that our nation, great though it is in so many ways, has a horrific history of political violence and a seemingly innate obsession with firearms. […] Tomorrow morning Chuck Schumer should put on the floor of the Senate a law mand … | Continue reading
The new Overcast is looking good! Smooth upgrade. From Marco’s blog post: For Overcast to have a future, it needed a modern foundation for its second decade. I’ve spent the past 18 months rebuilding most of the app with Swift, SwiftUI, Blackbird, and modern Swift concurrency. | Continue reading
I’ve recorded a short 2-minute video to show how we’ve updated Micro.blog’s editor layout for blog theme templates. Simpler, faster. You can find it on YouTube here. | Continue reading
Finished reading: The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz. I enjoyed the first half of this book. But after the time jump, for me it couldn’t recapture what had worked in the opening characters and story. 📚 | Continue reading
From the news blog: We’ve updated how blog themes are edited. If you don’t have a custom theme, Micro.blog will now create a placeholder one for you, with an “Open” button to edit any templates. There’s a new sidebar of template names, faster search, and faster CSS editing. Micro … | Continue reading
My blog has probably shifted way too much to the political, but that’s how it goes in an election year. Personal blog, personal opinions. But I’ve got some new Micro.blog improvements to talk about this week! Starting tomorrow. | Continue reading
Chris Enns: I wish we could have a day or two each month where we all collectively agreed to post about things we enjoy, love, appreciate, or celebrate. No rage farming, click baiting, or rants allowed. Just for one day. That would be nice! I might fail at this test, but it’s a g … | Continue reading
Just watched Biden’s statement on the shooting. Very good. He is the President and our Democratic nominee. To me, the debate about replacing him is over. The campaign is chaotic enough already. I still think he can win, but it’s going to be close, and it’s going to be work. … | Continue reading
Saying that Trump is a threat to democracy is not a call for violence. He caused January 6th. He refuses to accept the last election or the next one. He is chaos. Even after being shot, he’s shouting “fight” to the crowd. Everything he touches becomes more dangerous. Vote. DZ … | Continue reading
Just posted a new Core Intuition: A Billion-Dollar Flop. We check in about the Vision Pro, then think about how Apple plays the long game and what we can learn about balancing marketing features vs. app polish. | Continue reading
Rust judge dismisses the case against Alec Baldwin after prosecutors withheld evidence, saying: If this conduct does not rise to the level of bad faith, it certainly comes so near to bad faith as to show signs of scorching prejudice. This case always seemed unnecessary to me. The … | Continue reading
Here’s a sneak peek at a reorganized theme editor, moving a few things around to fix long-standing usability problems. When it’s ready (next week?) should be much easier to do quick edits without a bunch of clicks through managing themes. | Continue reading
Working on a couple different things, bouncing between them. One of those weeks where I can’t make up my mind what’s most important. | Continue reading
Joe Biden has always rambled, and it hurts him as he gets older. But here’s the deal. One candidate sounds confident but everything he says is nonsense. One candidate sounds mumbling but everything he says is correct. C’mon man! 🇺🇸 | Continue reading
I’m going to watch Biden’s press conference in a couple hours. But I already know it won’t change anyone’s opinion unless Biden magically looks 10 years younger. Curious if reporters will try to ask any questions that aren’t about how old he is. NATO summit this week was kind of … | Continue reading
Insightful post by Jason Fried on “directional” decisions, the kind of decisions that are strategic and bring a lot of other smaller decisions along with them: Make a directional decision and you’re now pointed this way or that way. Make a directional decision and you either shut … | Continue reading
Love these upcoming covers for A Song of Ice and Fire. I never finished reading past book 2 years ago and would like to pick up the series again. | Continue reading
I think I’m going to love this USA basketball team. Nice move swapping in Derrick White. 🏀 | Continue reading
The latest Washington Post / ABC News poll has the race tied. Voters thought Biden was old before, they still think that. Biden or Harris, the election will be decided by swing voters and misinformation. Millions don’t know he is convicted, don’t know about Jean Carol, don’t know … | Continue reading
Morning work at Cherrywood Coffeehouse. You know it’s old-school Austin because just saw what looked like a tiny baby scorpion crawling underneath the windowsill. Crept away, so hopefully I’m wrong or it doesn’t stick around. ☕️ | Continue reading
Dave Winer replying to my post yesterday: The way the twitter-alikes do discourse is not the only possible way, and imho, and, as I’ve said before (in 2007!), most of what passes for discourse on twitter is actually spam, and that goes for Masto, Threads, Bluesky and Facebook (ak … | Continue reading
Looking at my tweets from 17 years ago, they often had no faves, no replies, and no retweets (which didn’t really exist yet). And it was fine. There was value even with very limited engagement, just as there is with blogging today. | Continue reading
Sad to see the TUAW archive taken over by… whatever that is. AI-slopified. Brings back a lot of memories, though, going back through the Wayback Machine. The interview of me at WWDC 2007 seems lost to time, into the void of wherever Blip.tv content went. Also a tweet from that we … | Continue reading
Ben Thompson on Apple joining and then leaving the OpenAI board: …joining the board of OpenAI emphasizes the narrative that Apple needs OpenAI, suggests that OpenAI is far more integral to Apple Intelligence than it actually is, and puts Apple in the firing line for any future Op … | Continue reading
Ben Werdmuller, linking today to a story on Ghost federation: I’m also convinced there’s room for another fediverse-compatible social network that handles both long and short-form content in a similar way to Substack’s articles and Notes. If someone else doesn’t build that, I wil … | Continue reading
Here’s a screenshot of the new Get Info window in the latest Mac app for Micro.blog, released today. Makes it possible to quickly grab the auto-generated text for uploaded photos on the Mac. | Continue reading
Exhausting day yesterday so I crashed early last night. Unfortunately a couple of our servers crashed too. 🙁 Looking into options to prevent this. | Continue reading